Terrorism Expertise of Rohan Gunaratna Questioned

Rohan Gunaratna will take part in
a week-long seminar on terrorism and counter-terrorism
organised by the Religious Studies Department at
Wellington's Victoria University.

Gunaratna is a
self-styled expert on Islamic groups and terrorism. He is
still being described as “the former principle (sic)
investigator for the United Nations Terrorism Prevention
branch” [Sunday Star-Times. 15 August 2004] although
Australian journalists have established that no such post
has ever existed.

Martin Bright, the home affairs editor
of the Observer and long-time writer on Islamic terrorist
groups has described Gunaratna as “the least reliable of the
experts on bin Laden”.

Gunaratna’s current project to
establish a data base of Asian terrorist groups has been
said to blur the line between freedom of academic research
and intelligence-gathering for governments.

Gunaratna
tends to rely on what he claims are inside contacts within
intelligence networks. By their very nature, however, no
claims based of these sorts of sources can be independently
tested.

To the extent that they can be investigated, there
are many instances where they have been found to be
questionable. For example: Gunaratna’s claim that
Hambali, said to be the commander of Jemaah Islamiah the
group behind the Bali bombings, had visited Australia a
dozen times was refuted by Australian Attorney-General
DarylWilliams who said there was no evidence of him ever
visiting Australia.

Gunaratna’s claims of an Australian
connection with an alleged plot to fly planes into the
British Houses of Parliament were described be ASIO as
“lacking in credibility”.

In March 2003, Gunaranta claimed
(without producing evidence) that Australian Gunantanamo Bay
prisoner, David Hicks, was “not a member of al-Quaeda” and
“never intended to attack a civilian target”. In July,
after the US announced Hicks would be tried as a terrorist,
again without evidence, Gunaratna alleged that Hicks had
undergone “more advanced and more specialised training”
with al-Quaeda. “A person does not receive that level of
training unless both he and his trainers had some special
plans for him”.

The British publisher of Gunaratna’s book,
Inside al-Quaeda, took the extraordinary step of issuing a
disclaimer as a “Publisher’s note” advising the reader to
treat the book’s contents as mere “suggestions”.

In
January 2003, Gunaratna told the New Zealand Herald (again
without evidence) that “there are a few sympathisers and
supporters of various terrorist groups in New Zealand” and
claimed to have seen their fundraising leaflets. Now he
alleges that there are about a dozen groups linked to
terrorist support networks operated in New Zealand,
fundraising, recruiting and distributing propaganda.
Although this would be against New Zealand law, the latest
(April 04) government report about the unit responsible for
dealing with such matters, New Zealand’s Financial
Intelligence Unit, reveals that they have not identified or
had suspicions about any terrorist-related assets in New
Zealand, and have not frozen any assets with suspected
connections to the financing of terrorism. Commentary
from Dr David Small:

Before he was exposed, Gunaratna’s
impact in Australia was to heighten people’s sense of fear
and suspicion, particularly in relation to Islamic groups
and migrant communities. He was also assisting the
justifications for laws that undermined hard-won human
rights and civil liberties. Now he is bringing this message
to New Zealand with claims that “the terrorist threat to New
Zealand is not very different to the threat to
Australia”.

New Zealanders have demonstrated through our
most recent terrorist experience, the Rainbow Warrior
bombing, that we don’t need to be on a heightened state of
alert to notice terrorists in our midst, and we don’t need
special legislation to catch them.

Gunaratna is cloaking
his own personal views in a veneer of objective academic
expertise in order to push New Zealand further into the War
on Terrorism.

New Zealanders should treat his views with
scepticism, continue to be welcoming and trusting of migrant
communities, and rely on our common sense about the right
balance between actual risk and the value we have long
placed place on human rights and civil liberties.

At the
very least, Gunaratna should be asked to hand over to the
Police all the evidence that he claims to have about
terrorist support networks operating in New Zealand.

For
further comment, phone David Small on 021-1323739. Dr Small
is a human rights advocate, an academic at the University of
Canterbury, and an Advisory Board member of the Action,
Research and Education Network of Aotearoa

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